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Officials from Moscow have been meeting senior Taliban leadership in shadowy conferences to discuss the possibility of an unlikely alliance.

Sources suggest the talks have been going on for two years and were instigated by Russia, which has recently upped the dialogue as it looks to bring Taliban fighters on its side.

EPA

Mr Putin is trying to shore up the regime of Bashar al-Assad

Such a move could be enticing to Moscow because it would avoid the need to deploy Russian boots on the ground to achieve an all-out strategic victory which would prove a huge embarrassment to the West.

A former Taliban governor and member of the group’s military committee said: "The American global attitude and the threat from ISIS makes for a convergence of Taliban and Russian interests, and we could not rule out further cooperation, depending on the emerging scenario in the Middle East.”

It is understood high-ranking officials from Moscow have been secretly meeting Taliban leaders in the former Soviet state of Tajikistan.

Intelligence operatives said the discussions, which began in 2013 and involve the smuggling of significant arms shipments to the Taliban, have more recently turned towards the topic of a common fight against ISIS.

They also claimed heavy weaponry smuggled through Tajikistan played a crucial role in the terror group being able to take the Afghan city of Kunduz.

The conquest, which was the first a major city had fallen to the Taliban in 15 years, prompted a panicked response from the West which ended in the US bombing a charity hospital, killing doctors and patients.

Any alliance between Russia and the Taliban would come as a surprise given the latter's links to the Mujahideen resistance group, which successfully fought Moscow's occupation of Afghanistan throughout the Eighties.

But Pakistan's secret service, which has close ties to the Afghan Taliban, is said to be aware of contact between the two, and one former Taliban commander said the lure of defeating ISIS would outweigh any historical animosity.

They said: “If we could talk to the West, what’s wrong talking to Russians and Afghanistan’s neighbours in north.

The fight against ISIS

Fri, November 18, 2016

The battle against ISIS militants (also abbreviated as Daesh, ISIL, IS and Islamic State) continues in the Middle East.

ISIS has been pegged back in recent weeks, with Russian airstrikes obliterating dozens of jihadi targets.

The desperate terrorists are now forcing children as young as six to fight for them as their so-called Caliphate slides closer and closer to an all out defeat.

Russia has already sent in its elite Spetsnaz special forces troops to hunt down packs of fleeing jihadis, with Mr Putin hinting he may also be willing to dispatch 150,000 regular troops to wipe out the Islamists' de facto capital Raqqa.